Teacher Appreciation Day

I was standing in line at a downtown merchant’s when the man in front of me asked the sales clerk why there were so many school-aged children hanging around town at noon on a Wednesday.  “It’s Teacher Appreciation Day,” she replied.  He snorted. “What, they’ve got three days left? And then three months off? I wish I could get some appreciation like that!”  

Actually, there were eleven days to go at that point, and the summer break is only nine weeks this year, and…never mind.  Oscar Wilde said that a cynic is a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, and that’s how some citizens judge teachers – by what they cost. But it’s hard to write about feeling unappreciated without sounding petulant. And any teacher who thinks appreciation is all about vacation and pay is just as much of a cynic as the gentleman at the counter.   

Teaching is like baseball – most of the time, we fail. We watch kids sabotage their own lives. We watch them become willing accomplices to the social and economic forces that would consign them to a bleak future. We lie awake nights trying to think of something that will get through to them and then we read their final exams with dismay and go home and tell our spouses that we’re lousy at our jobs. 

Most teachers, I think, don’t do this job for the money or the time off. I think we do it in the hope – often vain -- that something we say or do will make a difference. But even when we succeed, we usually don’t know it at the time. Once in a while, if you’re lucky, some graduating senior mentions you in the yearbook. Maybe some parent writes you a note thanking you for what you’ve done for his or her child. Usually, they just leave and don’t look back. Baseball, Bart Giamatti said, is designed to break your heart. 

I went back to my old high school one day – it was probably 15 years after I graduated – and looked up Mr. Sanford, my former social studies teacher. He was a small man with a fine dry wit. He remembered me, to my surprise, and we went out for a beer after school. We had a lot of laughs. At the end, when I got up to go, he shook my hand and thanked me for visiting. “This is the grand prize of teaching,” he said. “When  they come back.”